This section describes approaches that could be employed, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or employed. Hence, unless explicitly specified otherwise, any approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application, and any approaches described in this section are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Network-based collaboration between users has evolved from users accessing a copy of an existing document (e.g., a word processing document or spreadsheet document) stored on a file server, to web-based collaboration sessions where users conduct online meetings using web-based collaboration services (e.g., the commercially available WebEx™). Web-based collaboration sessions are based on a presenter sharing a bitmap image of his/her display screen with other meeting participants; hence, meeting participants can view an exact replica of the presenter display screen.
A document stored on a file server is “static” in that the “document context” (i.e., all attributes associated with manipulation and/or presentation of the document) is stored within the document and therefore does not require generation of any additional content before presentation to a user. In contrast, a “dynamic” document (e.g., a dynamic web page) can be generated by a web server based on a “user context”, where each user view has a corresponding distinct view for viewing the same web page (e.g., “My Yahoo”, etc.). Hence, if a presenter is viewing a dynamic web document during a collaboration session, the participants are forced to view the bitmap image of the dynamic web page as viewed on the presenter device. Sending a reference or “hyperlink” of a dynamic web page to the participant device of a meeting participant during a collaboration session also is inadequate, because a meeting participant will only see a web page dynamically generated based on the context of the meeting participant.